Around the world in a weekend

I am - thankfully - not a watcher of much TV. I have plenty of time-wasting habits like the Internet and pointless bicycle repair, but the medium of television holds little allure for me most of the time.

Allow me then, to tell you that I spent an embarrassing portion of my weekend situated squarely in front of the tube. I resisted the Daytona 500 (a guilty Southern pleasure), but was given the breathtaking BBC series "Planet Earth" as a present. It is simply astounding.

I watched elephants brave dust storms in Africa's Kalahari Desert and a snow leopard chase down an ibex in the mountains between Afghanistan and Pakistan. I saw a slow motion capture of a great white shark that came so far out of the water off the coast of South Africa and showed so many of its teeth that I actually lifted my feet off the floor, apparently concerned that the massive fish might somehow be lurking under my second-hand couch.

The film work is amazing and the locations are impressive for both their remote nature and their incredible beauty. The patience and skill exhibited by the filmmakers both inspired my admiration and confirmed that I will never have a career as any sort of wildlife photographer.

So often these days what we see are lamentations over the declining state of the world complete with warning about polar ice melting and the loss of priceless rain forests. This series, as narrator David Attenborough accurately describes, is a celebration of what we do have and is left unspoiled by humans' often thoughtless or clueless actions.

Beyond that, though, I can't help but think that it is also a kind of audit, something that we could look back on in years to come and say, "This was the natural world as it was at the start of the 21st century." It could be a painstakingly crafted measuring stick to judge our future successes and failures in our relationship with nature. A sort of fossil record in high-definition.

Lucky as we are in the Flathead to be surrounded by the kind of spectacular nature shown in the film, I'm aware of the irony of sitting in front of a television to get a glimpse at the great outside. In 50 years or a hundred, I just hope many of the places captured for posterity are still around for those who follow us to see.

—Alex Strickland